Alf Lohr

Large Watercolours

15 April - 14 May 2005

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Untitled 2004 - 150 x 120cm

Quotes by Felicity Lunn, Art corespondent for Art Forum in Switzerland

The German word for seduction, 'Verführen', has a force that is missing from the English, a hint of being misled that comes close to the way in which Löhr's work takes the viewer through the immediate sensuousness to a darker and more complex environment. The colours start to communicate an edgy restlessness, maintaining a precarious balance between beauty and dissonance. The apparently harmonious palette is jolted out of complacency by acid colours, such as the yellows and pinks .

We move from visual pleasure to emotional experience. Free floating shapes show that change and movement are valued. Like any meaningful work of art, the acts of seeing, relating to and negotiating a painting by Alf Löhr set a complex temporal process in motion. In order to remain open to what they might reveal, we have to allow ourselves to be seduced by the paintings in the first instance, to be confronted directly by their generosity and the straightforwardness of the materials that the artist has restricted to fundamentals - light, colour and water on paper. There are all subtle illusions of the three-dimensional that shift our understanding of the work from being a flat surface to an image to be experienced from a number of perspectives.

The paintings and the video are like fragments of conversations, constantly open to new interpretations according to their juxtaposition an environment. Renegotiating notions of beauty and the aesthetic, they develop a new dynamic within abstraction that moves beyond the status of private expression, stimulating not merely subjective associations but an emotional richness and evoking a deeper form of recognition. Löhr's lyrical abstraction and vibrant use of colour put emphasis on painting as feeling. - He is very clearly part of a growing body of contemporary artists attempting to express current concerns around spirituality, intimacy and a sense of the unknown.

Untitled 2004 - 150 x 120cm

Quote by Richard Dyer, News Editor and London correspondent of Contemporary Art magazine

Painting against painting, Painting inside painting, Painting painting. Recovering the ur- and losing the ueber. loosing the ribic , the rorty rubic - without the signature. The name without the face, the trace without the tracer, the art without the author, sign without signifier. The turbulent floush of rose-madder entrapped inside the paper by the twin towers of flare-stain light, the flaser pods migrating into coolspace, gridwise, retaing. Loehr paints matter from the inside-out, tracing the trajectory of particles with no name, the charmed quarks and pi-mesons of the paralel universe of paint-essence, sub-aqua cartographer of the under-side of painting.

Jaarou 2004 - 300 x 120cm

Quote Prof Dr Tony Godfrey, Director of Contemporary Art at Sothebys Institute

These works are philosophical discourses on the shape or form and its possibilities in space . They are also, it should not be forgotten, exceptionally lyrical or beautiful. Layers of stain building up infinitley thin, translucent. Colour and form revealed by water which itself evaporates. Yet these works remain watery to our eyes. It is as though the essence or virtue of water still lingers.

Quote by Dr. Hans Günther Golinski as the director of the Museum of Contemporry Art in Bochum

From an anthropological point of view the act of drawing represents self awareness, or to be psychologically precise, the moment when you see yourself in relation to others and act upon it. In his drawings Alf Löhr seems to investigate and transform the unmarked void of his large sheets of paper with almost the same rigour as a child explores the endlessness of the world. The emptiness bears infinite possibilities for creation. The banal act of scribbling transforms itself into an act of creation. At the very moment that the pen touches the paper, genesis re-occurs. Löhr seems to want to remind himself that, as Hugo von Hofmansthal wrote at the end of the 19th century, " painting is a magical language, which speaks with coloured splashes instead of words and translates an inner vision of a mysteriously wonderful, being-less world around us," - "that painting has to do with thinking, dreaming and poetry," - "that colour like music has power over our soul."

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Untitled 2004 - 100 x 70cm

Untitled 2004 - 100 x 70cm